Does self-reference modulate the processing of all emotional words? The distinction between emotion-label and emotion-laden words.

Abstract

There is ample evidence of the influence of both self-reference and the emotional content of words in language processing and memory. This study examines the conjoint influence of both factors in a variant of the affective HisMine-Paradigm. Participants were presented with pairs of words, that comprised emotional (positive and negative) or neutral words, preceded either by the first-person possessive pronoun "my" (self-reference) or by the definite article "the" (no-reference). Emotional words were divided into emotion-label words (e.g., happiness) and emotion-laden words (e.g., party). Participants were asked to perform an affective evaluation task (i.e., to decide if the word pair conveyed a positive, negative or neutral meaning), followed by a valence rating task (i.e., to rate the word pair in terms of their valence) and an unexpected free recall task. The results for positive words, but not negative words, showed that self-reference facilitated the affective evaluation task and led to more extreme valence ratings. These modulatory effects were observed in emotion-laden words, but not in emotion-label words. These findings support a self-positivity bias, and the literature about the modulation of emotional word processing by self-reference, yet point out the relevance of the distinction between emotion-label words and emotion-laden words.